


Long and Heavy Years

by Snickfic



Category: Thor (Movies)
Genre: Angst, Characters Were in a Relationship But Broke Up Pre-Canon, F/M, Not Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie) Compliant, Post-Thor: Ragnarok (2017), Reunion Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-06
Updated: 2020-09-06
Packaged: 2021-03-07 02:41:58
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,492
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26169625
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Snickfic/pseuds/Snickfic
Summary: At the end of the third day, she was exhausted and aching for a drink, and so she let her guard down. She only took her bottle as far as one of the windows in what they were calling the great hall, where they were holding what they were calling a coronation feast. It consisted of a lot of nutrient bars dissolved in hot water. Valkyrie had lugged some of the crates herself.That was where Heimdall found her, as she’d known he would eventually.
Relationships: Brunnhilde | Valkyrie/Heimdall (Marvel)
Comments: 14
Kudos: 22
Collections: Alternate Universe Exchange 2020





	Long and Heavy Years

**Author's Note:**

  * For [scioscribe](https://archiveofourown.org/users/scioscribe/gifts).



> All hail my beta, who helped me fix this at the 11th hour.

She successfully avoided Heimdall for three days. She felt his eyes on her—nothing new there—but she kept her head down and focused on the work. There was plenty to do on a ship full of traumatized refugees who’d lost their homes, all their goods, and in some cases their entire families. They had to be fed, at least. They had to have some place to lay their head that wasn’t too close to someone else’s feet. She’d have laughed two weeks prior if anyone had said she’d doing this: organizing shifts of workers and sleepers, helping take a census. 

She told the passengers to call her Valkyrie. It wasn’t as though there was another one to mistake her for.

At the end of the third day, she was exhausted and aching for a drink, and so she let her guard down. She only took her bottle as far as one of the windows in what they were calling the great hall, where they were holding what they were calling a coronation feast. It consisted of a lot of nutrient bars dissolved in hot water. Valkyrie had lugged some of the crates herself.

That was where Heimdall found her, as she’d known he would, eventually. He stood at her side, arms crossed—and he looked good like that, bare-armed. Loose. Relaxed like she’d never seen him back on Asgard, even in bed.

Well, they’d both changed since those days.

They looked out the window together for a while. There was nothing for her to see except black, empty space, and he did not volunteer what he was looking at. Really, all that mattered was that just for this moment, she could be sure he wasn’t looking at her. It was the first time in years upon years that had been true. “Did you?” she asked, just loud enough for him alone.

“Did I what?” 

Well, _now_ he was looking at her, but at least she could look back. They were made equals by the trivial distance between them. He was so close she imagined she felt the heat of his skin. She’d forgotten how beautiful his eyes were.

Of course there was nothing equal about them at all, really. 

“Watch me, like you said you would.” She’d never been able to decide if he meant it as a warning or a promise. He’d stood there under his golden helm with his sword between his hands, ready to send her away, and he’d said, _If you should ever want my attention, you need only call_.

_And if I never do?_

She remembered it still, for all it had been thousands of years ago. He was the last Asgardian she’d ever spoken to, until Thor. She remembered the pause before he answered. _Then you shall have it anyway, on occasion. Unless—_

Unless she told him not to. For some reason she hadn’t, then; she hadn’t in all the intervening years. 

Now he said, “Sometimes.”

She nodded, looked away, took a swig from her bottle. It wasn’t a big enough swig, nor a big enough bottle for that matter, but supplies were limited. Eventually there’d be no booze left, and then she’d be fucked. She was trying to put that off as long as possible. Look at her, planning ahead. 

“How about you, then?” she asked. “What have you been up to, the last, oh, couple of millennia? You get married? Have a bunch of kids?” She was sorry even as she said it. Surely if there’d been children of his around, she’d have run into them by now. It wasn’t a large ship.

“No,” he said, but he was smiling a little. “I enjoyed company from time to time, but mostly I took refuge in duty. Perhaps I even hid myself in it. You were right about that, I think.”

Valkyrie snorted. “I was fucked up and pissed off. You shouldn’t have listened to anything I said.” She didn’t remember precisely what she _had_ said; that memory, at least, the years had washed away. Something about being blinded by his loyalty to Odin, probably, about seeing all and understanding none of it. About heartlessness and being unmoved by the bloodshed, which even then she’d known was false, but when she left Asgard, there’d been no room in her heart for justice or fairness.

“You were grieving,” Heimdall said, with that grave kindness that had always weighed heavily—even before the last battle with Hela, when Valkyrie failed. “And you’ll be pleased to know that my duty hasn’t prevented me from engaging in a little treason, now and again.”

She turned to stare at him. He wore a smile, small and warm and amused: the smile of a man with a secret. It was completely unfamiliar to her. “You,” she said dubiously. “Commit treason against Asgard.”

He mused on that a while. She could still read the quality of his silences, or of this one, anyway. “Against its sovereign, at any rate,” he said at last. 

“You defied Odin,” Valkyrie said, still disbelieving.

“I did,” Heimdall, all traces of humor gone. “Several times, depending on how you count. I cannot regret it.”

“Huh,” Valkyrie said, for lack of anything better. There was a story there; she almost gave enough of a shit to ask. Not quite, but close. It twinged a bit, the almost-caring, like a joint that hadn’t moved in a long, long time. “Wouldn’t have thought you had it in you. Of course, I bet you didn’t think I had any of that in me, either.” 

At least let her have that. At least let him be surprised at how far she’d fallen.

Instead of responding to that at all, Heimdall said, “I hoped you’d come back."

The words struck like a blow. “And here I am,” Valkyrie said. She took another pull off her bottle to try and swallow down the tightness in her throat. “Probably not the circumstances you were hoping for.”

He inclined his head in agreement. “Still. I’m glad you’re here now, Brunn—”

“Don’t,” Valkyrie said harshly. “That’s not—I’m not her anymore. It’s just Valkyrie now.”

That’d kill the conversation—or maybe she just hoped it would. She swallowed liquor that burned down her throat. She peered into the black to the few distant stars she could just about see.

Heimdall eventually broke the silence. “And what in the view interests you tonight, Valkyrie?”

The weight of his presence lifted, just a little. They were back to small talk now. Any other time, she’d have professed to hate small talk. “Better this than the walls of my cabin, people liable to come in any moment.” She’d been used to sharing quarters, once. Valkyries slept together on campaigns, four bedrolls to a tent. One more habit she’d lost.

Into these thoughts, Heimdall said, “I’m bunking alone.”

Valkyrie blinked at him. “Oh yeah? How’d you manage that?”

“Technically I’m sharing with Korg, but it seems rocks don’t require much sleep.”

“Imagine that.”

“You could finish your drink there, if you wished.” He met her startled gaze and held it.

Slowly, just to be sure, she said, “With company?”

“If you like.”

She looked him over. His locs were graying, and she didn’t know if that was stranger or less strange than the fact that he wore locs in the first place. The sleeveless look did good things for his arms. His gaze was still frank, still fearless, seeing everything and judging—well, remarkably little of it. His eyes were still that faceted golden color: amber and ripe wheat.

“Yeah, all right,” she said.

It transpired that Heimdall’s quarters were halfway across the ship. He could maybe have found her on his way to somewhere else, but she thought not. She swallowed that thought before it threatened to swallow her. 

His quarters were smaller than hers, with a one small bed, an alcove with sink and draw-out toilet, and a region of empty floor where she assumed Korg slept, given the fine litter of gravel. There was nothing else. Valkyrie sat on the bed, bracing her back against the wall. Heimdall sat down the bunk from her, and she held the bottle out to him. It felt like the thing to do: courtesy or a dare or both.

If it was a dare, Heimdall took it. He put the bottle to his lips and drank. Gravely he handed the bottle back. “Is that the best you could find?”

Valkyrie found herself laughing, obscurely humored. “It’s not so bad.” She took a foul-tasting swig and shrugged. “All right, it’s pretty bad. I’ve had worse, though.”

“I hope you’ve also had better.”

She could look him in the eye now. Maybe it was the privacy of his quarters, that short journey together down the corridor, the invitation and the fact that she gave it—or maybe she was just finally drunk enough—but she could his gaze and not feel like she staring into a sun, burning her retinas out. She could say, “I wasn’t really looking for better.”

Heimdall made no reply to that. He often hadn’t, she was remembering. He listened well and said little, and that’s how she’d found herself telling him things she’d told no one—not secrets, because she was too boring to have any of those, but trivialities she’d never thought to share before. How as a child she’d wished to become a court singer and was foiled by being unable to carry a tune; what things she dreamed of in the morning, right before waking.

After an interval, Heimdall said, “I always thought you’d return to us someday.”

Valkyrie snorted. “Was that foresight, then?”

“No, just optimism.”

She considered that a while. It still stung, the idea that someone had missed her, but a little less than it had a before. She said, “And is optimism why you came looking for me tonight?”

“Something like that,” he said, in a tone she couldn’t read—another strange, unfamiliar thing. She didn’t know that weary expression he wore, either. 

She gulped down the last of her booze. It really was vile stuff, not good for anything but the burn going down and that extra measure of distance it put between her and the world. She set the empty bottle on the floor and straddled Heimdall’s lap. She put her arms around his neck and waited a moment, to see if he was going to think better of this idea. His hands closed on her hips. He gazed solemnly up at her, and she looked back, and then she kissed him.

She’d forgotten the shape of his mouth. She’d forgotten how his fingers tangled in her hair and cupped the back of her skull, keeping her close—or maybe he hadn’t done it before. Maybe a man learned a few new tricks in bed, given a couple thousand years. He was warm beneath her, and he kissed deliberately, with a banked eagerness that might kindle to flame if she touched him just right. She wanted him, she realized. She felt the pleasant simmer of desire, but more than that, she simply liked touching him. She’d forgotten that, too. And the soft bristle of his beard against her mouth: that was entirely new. 

They separated briefly to undress. She admired the shift of his shoulder blades under his skin, the delicious curve of his bare arse. Valkyrie caught his gaze on her, too, steady and warmed by an appreciative smile. She crossed the tiny room and caught his face in her hands, and she kissed him again.

Somehow she ended up with the door at her back, shockingly cold on her overheated skin. “Like this?” she asked, more to hurry things along than because she expected him to say yes. Heimdall was a traditionalist. Heimdall fucked on a bed.

His breath was hot on her neck, harsh in her ear. “All right,” he said. 

He hiked her up with his hands under her thighs. She wrapped her legs around his waist, gripped his shoulders, and caught his mouth again. Between kisses, she said, “Go on, then.”

She remembered Heimdall being as deliberate in fucking as he was in everything else, but this time he was caught up in some need as urgent as hers. He shoved into her with a force that burned and then froze when she gasped. “Valkyrie,” he said, with something apologetic in his voice.

“Fuck me if you’re going to, Watcher.” She dug her nails into him and held on as he began to move.

She needed this: the stretch and the slap of flesh against flesh, nothing but feeling, not all of it pleasurable but every sensation sealing her more surely into her skin. She hadn’t even known how much she needed it—or how much Heimdall had, either. She hadn’t had any inkling of that. His thrusts lost all rhythm towards the end, and he was just as lost to the call of his blood as anyone. In that moment, they were exactly alike.

Afterwards, he leaned into her, against the wall, and put his face to her shoulder. He was shuddering. She hadn’t come yet. Awkwardly she reached around to hold the back of his head. 

“I shouldn’t have—” he said. “I should not—”

“Shut up,” Valkyrie said. She kissed his ear.

Carefully he lowered her until she could stand on her own feet. Then, without prompting, he dropped to his knees and put his face between her legs. “Shit,” she said shakily, still adjusting to the lack of cock in her. His beard chafed gently at her thighs. 

He lapped at his own come as it leaked out of her, a filthy, shameless thing that Heimdall of old would never have done. She came on his tongue, her fingers clutched around his locs.

They stumbled to the bed together afterwards, her shaky with aftershocks, him a little bit stuff about the knees. Only after she was there, lying against him, did she consider that she could put her clothes back on. She could leave.

She didn’t. She lay with her hand pressed to Heimdall’s chest. She stroked her thumb across the curly hairs.

Quietly, Heimdall said, “I am glad you’ve come back, Valkyrie.”

“So glad that you appointed yourself the welcome committee?” Valkyrie said lightly. She craned her neck to get a look at him.

There was no answering humor in his eyes. His gaze was sober, heavy with years she didn’t know anything about, with that story she hadn’t heard yet. She thought maybe she gave enough of a shit now to hear it. Or if not tonight, a night in the not too distant future.

Heimdall’s knees were stiff, and he’d defied Odin. Neither of them had an Asgard anymore except the people on this boat and their hapless one-eyed king. They were neither of them what they’d been before.

“Me, too,” she said at last. “I’m glad, too.”


End file.
